Lysandre

The former Girls frontman steps out with his first solo LP, a sort of prog-folk concept album based on very specific details of a particular moment in Owens' life with instrumentation heavy on sax and flutes.

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You can tell a lot about how Christopher Owens is feeling by looking at his hair. Back in 2009, when Girls first emerged, Owens' long, greasy locks seemed to serve a strategic purpose: They formed a thick veil behind which he could seek sanctuary, as he exposed the pain and longing that fuelled attention-seizing early singles like "Lust for Life" and "Hellhole Ratrace". The mesmerizing qualities of hair certainly weren't lost on Owens, who gave the name "Curls" to a blissful instrumental on Girls' debut, Album, and who used the lead-off track on 2011's follow-up, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, to reassert his "dirty hair" as an outsider status symbol. But Owens treated the more nakedly confessional songs of Father, Son, Holy Ghost as an opportunity to clean up his visage; the tours for that album saw him more comfortably settle into the role of bandleader, facing the crowds and late-night TV-show cameras straight-on through a neatly parted, tidily trimmed coiffure.

So it's rather curious that 0n the cover of his first release since Girls' surprising dissolution, Owens appears to be both ready for his close-up yet eager to use his mangy mane as a barrier. It's but the first of many contradictions that define the equally fascinating and frustrating Lysandre, a narrative concept album that runs a mere 29 minutes and is both more musically ornate yet somehow also slighter than anything Girls attempted, a deeply personal work whose arch presentation serves to keep you at an emotional distance.

When an artist opts to release a record under their own name, there's often the implication that songs will be more autobiographical and introspective. But where Girls provided Owens with a vehicle to translate his uniquely fucked-up life experiences into affirming, universal anthems, Lysandre presents very specific details of a particular moment in Owens' life-- complete with names, locations, and copious references to his singer-songwriter vocation-- in a more contrived setting. It's as if he were staging a dramatized meta-musical about his life. On the opening address "Here We Go", Owens sings, "If your heart is broken/ You will find fellowship with me" as if introducing himself to the audience as a character in his own play, the song's serene, pastoral-folk finger-picking and titular command signaling the dimming of the house lights.

Owens recently admitted to Pitchfork that Lysandre is an album that he just had to get out of his system, presumably to bring proper closure to the romantic relationship that blossoms and flames out (in inverse relation to Owens' ascendant musical career) over the course of the record. Though divided into 11 tracks, Lysandre functions as a single, continuous piece, with a recurring instrumental motif ("Lysandre's Theme") serving as a thread and reinforcing that sense of feeling haunted by a memory. But if the story of Lysandre is so significant to Owens that it demanded its own song cycle, his musical treatments don't always do the material justice.

On Girls' albums, Owens undercut the sense of despair with moments of levity, but Lysandre overemphasizes the latter quality to the point of undermining the sensitive subject matter. The chirpy flute lines that cut through "Here We Go" and the buoyant title track cross the line from classy embellishment to garish distraction, and the disarming portraits of poverty, desperation, and violence that run through "New York City" are neutered by an oddly upbeat execution that confuses the Velvet Underground's idea of rock 'n' roll with that of Huey Lewis, thanks to an interminably goofy sax solo that oversells the optimism of starting life anew in the Big Apple. But even those transgressions don't quite prepare you for "Riviera Rock", a transitional mid-album ersatz-Santana jam that apparently signifies some unexplained tropical-getaway plot turn, but comes off like a tiki-lounge act's introducing-the-band segment.

Owens is keenly aware of the risks he's taking with Lysandre: Though the insecurities expressed on the winsome "Love Is in the Ear of the Listener"-- "What if everybody just thinks I'm a phony/ What if nobody ever gets it?"-- may stem from his early-career stage fright, they're just as trenchant now that he's derailed a much-loved and increasingly popular band to go solo. But the songwriting is rarely a problem on Lysandre: The dolorous acoustic ballads "A Broken Heart" and "Everywhere You Knew" show that Owens' command of understated devastation remains unparalleled, using simple, seemingly mundane imagery to set unspeakably intimate scenes of awkward first kisses and airport farewells. And the excellent closer "Part of Me (Lysandre's Epilogue)" brings this occasionally gaudy album to a refreshingly grounded conclusion, forsaking the baroque flourishes in favour of a Harvest-worthy harmonica refrain and gently rollicking country rhythm. "You were a part of me/ That part of me is gone," Owens sings with a combination of sadness and relief, bidding farewell to his girl, or Girls, or maybe just to that part of him that was itching to make a prog-folk concept album overstuffed with sax and flutes. At the very least, Owens emerges from the other side of Lysandre sounding liberated, and ready to brush that hair out of his eyes once again.